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Back when I was in the second year of highschool, I participated in an international highschool exchange program and travelled and studied in Osaka for 1 year. It was a fantastic experience. From that year, I'd attended every single Comic Fest held at the Tokyo Big sight. However, I did not become an active manga/doujinshi fan until I started university in Australia.

I have friends all over Japan, from tokyo to nara to toyama to senda to kyoto to osaka to hiroshima.....almost everywhere and so I came to learn some of the local dialects.

I also have friends in korea as well. I go there once a year to go have korean barbeque with my friends there and to catch up on things. I started learning some korean around second grade of elementary school because some of my friends were korean and I remember that I used to walk with my korean friends and their parents everyday to and from school and I was curious as to what they were talking about with their parents. They were kind enough to teach me some korean. It's not until I started university when I had my first formal lesson in korean. I also had the opportunity to stay in korea for 2 months in my winter break during my second yr in university to study korean and it was a fine experience.

Alot of my korean and japanese friends were my former language exchange partners.

As for chinese, I've studied it since I was very young, even though I came to Australia when I was 6, I started to go to chinese saturday school since I was in elementary second grade. My parents were very strict with my chinese learning too.

For some reason, I tend to pick up languages rather quickly. I think it is exciting to be able to speak other people's languages and see how surprised the other party would be to hear me speak their language so fluently.

Now getting down to my methods of translating and how I go about producing the scanlations that I release on MH.

As I am a one-man scanlation group, I obviously need to have some experience in all aspects of the scanlation production process. ie cleaning, typsetting as well as translating, editting and proofreading.
However, I will only talk about translating here.

When I do the translations, I generally do NOT have dictionary with me, or rather, I try not to use it unless I really have to. The reason is that the most important thing to me in terms of translations is the emotions expressed in that particular chapter as a whole. So rather than directly translating the words as they are, I tend to translate the emotions coming from those words, and express it in english in such a way that produce at least close to the emotion that I feel when I read it in Japanese. This is one of the reasons why I prefer to edit/proofread my own translations rather than leaving it to someone else to do it. And thanks to my highschool english teacher who forces her students to use sophisticated language in their essays, my vast english vocab is rather convenient when trying to look for the right words for my translations.

So basically, all I have in front of me to start off with, is an A4 notepad and a pen and of course the actual manga chapter. What I do first is run through each page and jotting down what I think the general meaning is. Then I go back and read what I wrote down and make changes accordingly so that the english in there makes sense to me. Usually I only need to read through no more than 3 times. I may correct the translations again as I do the actual typesetting and that is why I don't submit separate translations to my scanlations.

Re: The minase_hatsukoi thread

As an anime/manga fan myself, i was wondering if you would consider doing a reasonably well known japan only manga called Magical Taruuto-kun. I have already found raw files of the manga, but i desperately need a translator (i haven't learned japanese yet XD). if you do decide to translate the series, the manga raw files are here:http://www.megaupload.com/?f=2MTG2TQ1